Preschool Corner: Back in the Swing of Things!

Officially, this week marked the first week of our new school year. We have been doing a scaled down version of things all summer just to keep ourselves in school mode, but it definitely kicked up a notch in our house.

For us it means a few transitions. We’re testing the ‘kindergarten’ waters for Zachary and will be stepping things up for Kaleb, so over the next few months you may notice a shift in focus from Zachary over to Kaleb in the realm of preschool. For now, Zachary will still be our family’s poster child for the preschool happenings ~ until Mommy gets things fully lined up for Kaleb to do a little more during his school time.

Zachary has joined in with the girls to learn about geography and this week we did a basic review of the continents and how to read a map. He was so excited to be able to fill in his own workbook ~ especially labeling the compass N, S, E. and W.

He remembers the continents too thanks to our lovely Geography Songs cd {and was rather proud of himself for that one}. While I would spend time working with the girls on their language or writing, I would find him on the couch studying some of our interactive geography books.

Our workboxes have now gone full-force and the kids are loving them! Over the summer while we were adjusting them we only had a few a day, but Zachary has between 8-10 a day and we are getting in some fun learning games during the day for him. A highlight for him has been playing a new math game on the computer {and Mommy finally broke down and let the kids use the laptop}.

He and I worked together this week with Kaleb’s stringing beads to sequence numbers from 1 to 10 and then pulled blocks from the row to form 2 digit numbers. I called out a number {“63”} and he had to put the number together and show me what he did.

We’ve also spent a lot of time reading together this week. We started back on some of the basic books we have from Scholastic just to get him motivated and while he fussed about it when we pulled them out, he kept asking to do more by the time we were done. In the next few weeks we’re going to be starting the Rocket Phonics program with him {and I am very excited about it!!}.

We have a few little visitors in our house too! A friend of ours shared some of the many caterpillars that she has and we have our own tank to watch them grow and change. One has gone into it’s chrysalis already and the other two are growing like crazy! Next week we’ll be doing some more crafts and learning more about the life cycle of a butterfly.

That pretty much sums up our week! Can’t wait to hear what you all are doing!

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